We understand that President Ahmadinejad has set three conditions for his return to presidency:
- Mashaie to be named the First Vice President
- Moslehi to leave the ministry of intelligence
- Saeed Jalili is removed from his post as head of the Supreme National Security Council.
Mashaie was appointed by Ahmadinejad as the First Vice President when he was re-elected to his second term. The supreme leader then officially ordered Ahmadinejad to remove Mashaie from his post. Ahmadinejad did that only to appoint Mashaie as his chief of staff, and giving him the authorities normally reserved for the First VP. Mashaie was eventually forced to resign his post as chief of staff.
Moslehi, the intelligence minister, was fired by Ahmadinejad but hours later he was reinstated by Khamenei. Last Sunday when Moslehi attended the cabinet meeting for the first time after his reinstatement, Ahmadinejad did not show up for the meeting although he was in Tehran at the time.
Saeed Jalili holds the important post at the national security council, but was appointed to the post by Khamenei in obvious slight to the power of the presidency.
Uskowi on Iran reported on Monday that Ahmadinejad had refused to show up at his office and was absent from the meeting of the cabinet in which Moslehi was in attendance. We also believed at the time that a late Monday meeting between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei had resulted in Ahmadinejad’s return to his office. But we now understand that Ahmadinejad is still insisting on the conditions outlined above before resuming the office of presidency, and did not attend yesterday’s cabinet meeting, creating the gravest political crisis in the Islamic Republic since President Bani Sadr was impeached and forced into exile in 1981.
Meanwhile, 12 conservative members of Majlis today officially put in motion a proposal to impeach Ahmadinejad.
3 comments:
Now it's starting to get interesting. Let's see if there is some give and take offered or this becomes zero-sum. Either way, there are positive possibilities.
Nader,
You are "reporting" hearsay and rumors without any sort of confirmation, and without much in terms of intelligent analysis.
Why would Ahmadinejad set one of his conditions as return of Mashai as VP? This "news" has either been put out by the reformists or the prinipalists to attack him, and to make it look like the whole fight is over Mashai. A person of Ahmadinejad's intelligence does not give ammunition to his domestic enemies this easy.
Paul,
Ahmadinejad was the one who chose Mashaie as his first VP upon his reelection. Khamenei openly ordered him to dump Mashaie, in a letter published by the country's news agencies, which was thought at the time, and correctly so, to be a direct challenge to the authority of an elected president to choose his deputy. Ahmadinejad countered the move with hours by appointing Mashaie to be his chief of staff and gave him almost as much authority as that of a first VP, and later expanded his portfolio by naming him his representative for the Middle East. At the time many commentators in this blog praised Ahmadinejad, and rightly so, for his independent actions. Mashaie was forced to resign his chief of staff position, a move Ahmadinejad suspected to be orchestrated by the intelligence minister Moslehi and the hardliner. Hence the type of reaction by Ahmadinejad, like firing Moslehi only to be reinstated a few hours later by Khamenei. Why wouldn't Ahmadinejad want him as his principle deputy? He believes the constitution and the tradition gives him that authority. Why such thinking needs to be described as a conspiracy by the reformists and principalists?
On our sources: I have explained this during other occasions. This blog's factual reporting (and of course not the editorials) are based on the reports by news agencies, among them major Iranian agencies, and other media. If however we receive a report directly on a development in the country that we consider as authoritative, and only if we can corroborate the report by at least a second independent source, we will report it as fact, prefacing it with a phrase like Uskowi on Iran has learned ...
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